My Most Memorable Thanksgiving

Normally I stick to massage on this blog, however this time I’m going to shake things up and tell you about my most memorable Thanksgiving EVER.

When you think of Thanksgiving, you think of turkey, cranberries, pie and watching football. This Thanksgiving had nothing to do with any of those things.

When I was about 14, my grandmother took us to Disney World. That’s right! She took ALL OF US – all 4 of her kids and all the grandchildren to Disney for about 5 days. It was magical!

Some of us were old enough to go between Disney and Epcot without any adult supervision. (And this was before cell phones because I’m talking about the 80s.) All we had to do was be at a designated place at a designated time in the evening to check in with an adult so they could make sure we weren’t incapacitated in some fashion. Then, we had to be at the shuttle stop to our hotel at closing time.

It sounds crazy by today’s standards, but we were on our own pretty much the entire time.

For the actual Thanksgiving Day, we ate hot dogs and drank soda somewhere in Adventure Land after going on Thunder Mountain Railroad 8 times. Then, we filled up on ice cream and whatever concoction of junk you could eat in Disney during the 80s. I especially loved that half of my day wasn’t overfilled with testosterone inducing Dallas Cowboy games. We talked, had fun, and could just be teens in Disney. Looking back, it was the perfect 80s vacation.

That is, until this happened:

Thanksgiving night ended with my cousins and I deciding to go use the hot tub in a different hotel. Ours didn’t have a hot tub, so I guess we felt slighted in some way.

We told all of our parents that we were going to the arcade in our hotel, and then snuck off into the woods where there was a trail that led to the hotel a mile away. For a few hours, we had a great time swimming in a hotel pool that wasn’t ours and giggling in an ill-gotten hot tub.

The fun ended, though, when we went back to our hotel. We rounded the corner of the lobby, still wet, and ran into my father and uncle. They were less than impressed.

“Where were you?” my dad demanded.

My cousin started running in place and said, “jogging.”

They just looked at us. Obviously, they knew we hadn’t been jogging in wet swimsuits and flip flops. At that moment I was so frightened that our freedom at Disney would disappear for the remainder of the trip. I just knew that we would have to walk around the parks with our parents asking permission for every single thing.

We ‘fessed up and told the truth, and the first part of our punishment was handed down: we had to go spend the next hour or so actually playing video games. It’s a kid’s dream right? Not for me. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but I had to spend an hour with wet hair playing Pac Man, and I wasn’t particularly good at Pac Man.

I was dreading what would happen next.

And then it happened.

We called it the Thanksgiving Miracle. My uncle looked at my father and said, “You know, we would have done the same thing.” My dad scoffed and said, “No we wouldn’t. We would have been smart enough NOT to have gotten caught.”

And at that point, the punishment ended! Sure, my dad escorted us back to our rooms, but the next day all was forgiven.

We still had our freedom. Granted, my aunt made sure to hide her car keys in case the only licensed teenager got the urge to drive us around Orlando without permission! So, even with the most bizarre form of punishment in the history of my childhood, it was still the most perfect 80s Thanksgiving ever!

What was your most memorable Thanksgiving? Let me know in the comments.